Thursday, August 30, 2007

Spam vs. Bacon

I am very intrigued by a new term I heard about on NPR and want to alert my old friends in Cleveland, the editors of the definitive dictionary, Webster's New World (we will have to see if it catches on). We all get tons of email we don't want to read but it falls into different types of junk mail (just as my snail mail does). First there was spam. Now there is bacn (pronounced "bacon"), the latest buzzword to infiltrate the Internet.


Spam is junk email like those neverending messages about Viagra or from people in Africa seeking money but according to NPR, bacn is e-mail you want to read — just not now.

I used to think it was funny/annoying that whenever I asked B&N.com to send a targeted email to their customers about a certain book, using buying history, they would argue that they didn't want to overload these people's email boxes. But they certainly don't hesitate to send me messages that rarely relate to my interests. What, I'm not special?

No comments: